The present invention relates to technology for inferring or estimating user information for controlling equipment in a motor vehicle with minimal user input.
Controlling numerous devices and products from a central location has become a common part of everyday life as a result of advances in computer systems. This includes automobiles and other motor vehicles where audio equipment, telephones and other communications devices, display devices, air conditioning systems, and lighting equipment can be controlled from a driver's seat. It is even possible for the driver to use an on-board navigation system to obtain route assistance, and more recently to search for hotels and other facilities via the Internet.
This type of central control capability should provide comprehensive control of equipment operations for a convenient, user-friendly environment. In reality, however, these systems are not always particularly convenient from the user's perspective. This is because the man-machine interface often makes it difficult for the user to input user commands to the system, and the user is therefore unable to operate the equipment as desired.
For example, while voice recognition technology enables the user to control equipment by voiced instructions, this requires the user to speak particular command words to the system each time particular equipment is operated. This becomes increasingly complicated as the number of controllable devices and functions increases, because the user must accurately enunciate a larger number of words. This also means that the voice recognition system must be able to accurately recognize a wide range of user-spoken words in order to control the equipment as instructed by the user.
To resolve this problem, it is proposed to operate equipment semi-automatically as disclosed in JP-11-351901A and JP-2000-20090A. JP-11-351901A teaches to search a database of operating content settings for system operating content based on input content, individual data, and detected conditions to operate the equipment. JP-2000-20090A teaches to infer a request based on user circumstance and conditions. These technologies are able to operate equipment according to the user's intent using less spoken input from the user.
The user information, however, is recorded as a profile in the above JP documents and has several interrelated levels of information descriptive of, for example, the user's surrounding environment and conditions, the user's current situation and requests, and the user's actions. In JP 2000-20090A, for example, the user's future situation is predicted from the user's request, and the user's next request is inferred from the user's situation.
If the user's true intention is to be considered, there will clearly be cases in which the user's request cannot be sufficiently inferred from the user situation that is sensed by the system. That is, there is a need for the system to more specifically and more accurately detect such user information as the user's environment, condition, situation, request, and actions in order to more appropriately operate the equipment.